14 DAY TRIAL // There is no question that Advanced Micro Devices has been doing well on the graphics front over the past few months, as the sole supplier of DirectX 11-capable graphics adapters, but the same cannot be said about the company's processor range. While Intel is reaping the profits of its Pine Trail platform for netbooks and its new CPUs with integrated graphics, AMD seems to be lagging behind its rival. In order to make up for this, the Sunnyvale, California-based CPU and GPU developer aims to bring Fusion APUs for netbooks by 2011.
Hardware Central reports that 2011 will be the year when Advanced Micro Devices launches its own processors for the low-cost, ultra-mobile computing segment. The company has been developing the Fusion for quite some time and, while details are scarce for now, it is known that the APU (accelerated processing unit) will merge both processing and graphics on the same chips. The exact type of design that AMD plans to use is still unknown, but it will have to compete against Intel's Westmere family of Core i5/i7 chips that already have integrated graphics.
The report doesn't go into any details concerning the APU range, but does indicate that the Netbook chip will consume between ten and 15 Watts, about the same as Intel's Atom CPUs, and “will have a good processor integrated with graphics, so you won't need the [Nvidia] Ion graphics to give it half-decent performance,” according to Nigel Dessau, chief marketing officer at AMD. It is also possible that the chip will be part of the “Bobcat” line and will be optimized for 12-inch and smaller devices.
Through its mobile processors, Advanced Micro Devices aims to compete with both Intel and ARM. Still, the Sunnyvale company might have its work cut out for it already, considering that Intel will most likely make advancements of its own by then. In the end, the competitiveness of AMD's solutions will be determined by just how well Fusion performs.